Conferences & Events

A shared experience among institutions advancing IPE is the challenge of developing, implementing and scaling meaningful experiential IPE. The collaborators on this seminar confirm the usual reasons for this issue that have been widely described (Brandt, 2015). However, an additional common observation is the striking paucity of ubiquitous models of interprofessional team-based care across the practice and community settings where health professional learners rotate. Adding to this challenge is the operational difficulties facing practice and health systems, especially after the pandemic.

We propose that our IPE programs must invest greater energy in providing optimal experiential interprofessional team-based settings for our learners, but that this requires us to be partners in shaping these environments. Rather than selecting specific sites and asking, “can you take our students”, we should instead ask “how can we partner with you to help transform interprofessional practice in your setting?”

We have specific experience with this pivot at our institutions, transforming our IPE unit’s relationships with health systems to foster interprofessional teamwork in healthcare ("downstream work"), leading to enhanced learning environments ("upstream work"). Our seminar will use brief didactics that introduce a framework for stakeholder engagement (Mendelow, 1991) and small group breakouts. Facilitators will help participants develop a strategy to identify key stakeholders, understand their needs, survey the environment for data sources and tools that reveal opportunities, and assemble teams to manage the change required.

Theme Relevance
This seminar focuses on the theme by tackling one of the most challenging aspects of the work we do as educators: building a bridge between education and practice based on partnerships and relationships, rather than the usual transactional approach to our work. Success in this endeavor will ultimately provide better experiential IPE opportunities for our health professional students.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify key stakeholders for transforming practice and/or community settings towards a collaborative model for the benefit of professionals, patients, learners and the system.
2. Develop a structured approach to understanding the priorities of those stakeholders.
3. Align and leverage existing enterprise data and other existing tools to guide opportunities for partnering on change that can transform these settings.